3 minute read
Lord, Have Mercy!
By Rev. John Bart Day
“Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!”
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I screamed. I remember laying in the grass, almost in tears, fingers throbbing with pain. I loved playing “Mercy!” with my best childhood friend. We locked fingers and had at it for hours. He was a manageable opponent.
It never failed that his older brother had to get into the act. It wasn’t that he destroyed us, but that he made us beg for mercy. He never stopped.“Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!” He didn’t care that we cried and pleaded. He wasn’t interested in compassion. He was pleasured by our pain.
The two blind men sitting by the roadside knew Jesus even though they had never seen Him. But you don’t need to see to believe. Faith comes from hearing, but from hearing more than only passing footsteps. They heard the Word of eternal life, and in that Word they placed their hope. And even more than believe in that Word, they held Jesus to it.
“Lord, have mercy on us!” Show us Your compassion. Be the gracious Lord that You have promised to be for us. Be the Lord who opens the eyes of the blind and unstops the ears of the deaf. “Lord, have mercy on us!”
St. Matthew tells us of a woman, a wretched Canaanite, who also dared ask the Lord for mercy even when He refused (Matt 15:21-28). She was unbending. “Jesus, be the Lord you have promised to be!” Mercy was shown to her daughter at that very hour. The mighty King David too acknowledged his sickness from sin (Psalm 41) and praised the Lord for the mercy he was shown.
To call Him Lord is to confess Him as Son of God and Son of Mary. To call Him Lord is to see His weakness as power, His bloody death as victory and life. To call Him Lord is to expect mercy from His nail-pierced hands. To call Him Lord is to hold Him to His promise, the promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever.
Mercy has been given to us through the suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of the only-begotten Son of God. In His sinless flesh the curse of the law would be undone. Lovingly and willingly He came to taste death for us. For Him there would be no mercy. Neither from the world nor from His Father. He would drink the Father’s cup of wrath to the dregs. As a lamb alone He bears willingly a betrayer’s kiss, Pharisees’ accusations, Roman whips, the bite of nails, and abandonment by His Father. What the world meant for evil God has used for good.The Christ died to sin, once for all, so that sin and death no longer have power over us. In the sleep of death the devil was undone. His lying mouth closed forever. “Lord, have mercy!”
Mercy is not an abstract thing. It is the very Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth. And because He is mercy, we gather where He is, receiving what He desires to give us: the forgiveness of sins and the seal of eternal life.
In the Divine Service, after the Lord has come among us in His flesh and blood through the power of His word, we stand and adoringly sing:
His body and blood bring mercy. In the eating of His flesh and the drinking of His blood, we receive the mercy that faith desires. We come like the blind men, the Canaanite woman, and David. We come confessing our blindness, our hellish desires, our sin and sickness.
At the table we lay down all our sorrows and burdens to have them taken up by Christ. The mercy we have first received in the gift of Christ now lives in us through His body and blood. We go forth from the table sharing one another’s sorrows and burdens, sharing the Lord’s mercy, His forgiveness, with those in the world around us. We have been given more mercy than imaginable. So much that it overflows into the lives of our neighbor. “Lord, have mercy!”
Rev. John Bart Day is associate pastor of Memorial Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas. You can email him at bjdayfamily@sbcglobal.net.
